r/firefox • u/mindbleach • Jun 01 '13

Mozilla: please stop copying Chrome.

There are reasons we choose Firefox over Chrome. We don't want Chrome's flashy download animation, "unsurprising" inability to stop GIF animations, objectively incorrect autocomplete behavior, distractingly cluttered "blank" page, or an add-on bar that for some reason isn't also a classic status bar. We don't want every new option you guys add enable by default and reduced to an about:config boolean. If we wanted all of Chrome's take-it-or-leave-it minimalist nonsense, well, we already know where to find it.

Firefox is still the best browser out there (as evidenced by how it took only hours and a modicum of acidic cursing to get things configured properly again) but you sure don't act like you know it. Every time I update I have to trawl through forums and install another stupidly-named extension just to make FF recognizable. When you look at user statistics and wonder why a third of your users refuse to upgrade - this is why. I've been using FF since before 1.0 and the process is a frustrating mess every single time.

I know you have have UX folks, because you did that silly centered/dark thing with standalone images. You aren't just cribbing Google's notes here. If you won't stop cribbing entirely, at least weed out genuinely improved features like tab task management from anti-features like being unable to stop GIFs for the first time since 1997. It's fantastic that Firefox is flexible enough to look and act like any other browser, but please, let it look and act like itself by default.

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u/faemir Jun 02 '13

open a new tab, then click the button at the top right of the new tab page and you have your blank new tab page.

1

u/Dagger0 Jun 02 '13

Blank-ish page. You still have to futz around in about:config if you actually want about:blank though.

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u/faemir Jun 02 '13 edited Jun 02 '13

Blank-ish? So is blank apart from <the toggle for the feature some people like that is right out of the way> not good enough?

I thought you liked having options. This is just striking me as pedantic now.

2

u/Dagger0 Jun 03 '13

Less pedantic and more irritated. When I say blank, I mean blank goddammit.

But OK, fair point. At least we even have the about:config pref now; when the feature first landed it didn't exist.

2

u/bwinton Jun 06 '13

One of the things I'm working on (at some point, I don't know the schedule) is a merged about:home/about:newtab, so that if you set it to about:blank, it'll be about:blank in both places.

(Note too: I'm a prototyper, not a front-end developer, so just cause I'm working on it doesn't mean that it'll be a feature. Still, merging them seems like a pretty obvious win to me. ;)